Sam Spratt.. you are quickly becoming one of my favorite artists. Well played sir. Well played indeed. samspratt: Well I’d argue heavily that there’s nothing even remotely wrong with drawing porn or sex if that’s what you want to draw — but she is a mother after all so let’s mainly focus on selling her on nudity’s detachment from sex and its artistic utility for now. While the most progressive out there would simply deem nudity as having no attachment to sex and that The Man is oppressing everyone… generally speaking, people seem to ditch clothes while they have it. Even with blind, progressive, idealism, the connection is pretty easy to make. The problem is that for whatever reason, that one simple nudity/sex link has taken over and spread to the nudity/clothes-changing, nudity/breast-feeding, nudity/bathroom-going, and nudity/hygiene links as well. Literally everyone (maybe sans Tobias Fünke) gets naked or naked enough to be societally-deemed “offensive” from day one of their lives, and while I personally don’t think being naked’s association with sex should matter in the first place, I also just don’t feel that the ties from sex to nudity should have changed its socially-normal definition so expansively when nakedness exists in such frequency for such unsexy reasons. While undressing can certainly be stage 1 for sex, on a daily basis for me (and most people) 90% of the time it just means things like hopping around and tripping trying to get jeans off and looking like you’re Jim Carrey trying to escape from the robotic Rhino in Ace Ventura 2 while you wrestle out of a shirt if you were nervous at all that day. I don’t even need to explain why breast-feeding or going to the bathroom is in almost all instances non-sexual, and while a bath/shower is just one of a bajillion places one can have sex, yet is the de facto standard of where you clean yourself in much of the world — it’s pretty baffling that the same place I go to to sanitize myself after a New York subway ride gets such a sexy spotlight in society. Now, I mention all of these very normal, largely non-sexual, things in reference to drawing nude people, because, well… drawing ‘em is right there with the others. As mentioned, there are exceptions to all of the above. Have I and most mildly competent artists somehow managed to woo a gal or two by painting them like French girls? Sure. But that wasn’t because nakedness was involved, some people are just attracted to artistic ability in the same way some people are attracted to non-naked things like “nice hair”, “a good vocabulary”, or “a deep understanding of the Harry Potter universe.”  Most people don’t try to feed a baby THROUGH a shirt, change clothes while keeping all of their original clothes on, or take a leak while their jeans are still zipped up and buttoned tight… they/we get down to basics and expose ourselves because “nude” is our natural state — it just makes more sense. Drawing clothed people works fine, but when LEARNING HOW to draw people, it is most helpful and practical to do so while they’re in their natural state. In life drawing classes, the models are there as tools for learning. Bodies reduced to their simplest of forms — nipples, penises, vaginas, and butts galore included — are there for you to study and practice. And what’s crazy about learning to draw people naked, is that after staring at all that skin for so long, you a) Get over any weirdness you feel about nudity and b) actually learn how to draw people fully clothed better without even realizing it. By understanding how everything underneath sits, it suddenly becomes much easier to not just see a shirt, but to see how it interacts, falls, and folds across skin, muscle, and bone. You learn about movement, how joints interact, how skin stretches and crinkles, and the relationship on a macro level from limb to limb down to slightly more micro-level things like where nipples fall on a chest, the many positions of the chest depending on how the body is contorted and how arms are raised, or the creases from pelvis to thigh as legs and waist pivot about… Drawing nude models isn’t just something I personally use as someone who draws many portraits, it’s honestly MOST valuable to people like animators and (when they’re not twisting their super heroines into anatomically impossible positions) comic book artists. I know people at Pixar and in the game industry who take nude life-drawing lessons all the time because it keeps them sharp and because those same fundamentals that some deem “pornographic” are applied beautifully to something as child-friendly as animating a beloved Disney film. There are MANY value systems that demonize sex and sexualize anything within a few degrees of Kevin Bacon from it — something as simple as drawing people nude is just one of many casualties from that line of thought. But naked is just what we are. It’s our natural state. In a perfect world, you’d be able to draw naked people, sex involved or not, without needing an explanation or defense for your parents, but this is something much more basic. Your mother thinking you can take an art class and fully learn to draw people without learning how to draw them nude, is like her expecting you to get squeaky clean while showering with your clothes on. You can do it I guess… but it really just does not make much sense. 

Sam Spratt.. you are quickly becoming one of my favorite artists. Well played sir. Well played indeed.

samspratt:

Well I’d argue heavily that there’s nothing even remotely wrong with drawing porn or sex if that’s what you want to draw — but she is a mother after all so let’s mainly focus on selling her on nudity’s detachment from sex and its artistic utility for now.

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